Africa has been going through a cluster of genocidal wars recently,
currently in Darfur and Burundi, almost exactly ten years after the
genocide in Rwanda. However, Africa is not unique in this, since all
countries go through genocidal wars on a regular basis.

Darfur - southwest region of Sudan (Source: BBC)

There's a slow-motion genocide going on today in the Darfur region of
Sudan. Over a million people have been displaced from their homes,
thanks to massacres and rapes by government-sponsored Janjaweed
militias. The United Nations and other international agencies have
been bickering over whether aiding the displaced people is just
another excuse for American intervention in a Muslim country.

A genocide like the one going on in Darfur today is a force of
nature. Human beings can no more prevent it than they can stop a
raging typhoon. All the politicians can do is appear to be trying to
do something about it so that they won't be blamed, and that's what's
going on. I suspect that, by this time, most of the international
politicians are well aware that the death of a million people in
Darfur cannot be stopped.

This comes just a few months after the international community
gathered together to mourn the genocide that killed a million people
in Rwanda in 1994. At that meeting, the politicians bemoaned the
fact that they didn't stop the 1994 genocide, and they vowed that
they would never let it happen again. It's ironic that a new
genocide would call their bluff by occuring so soon after, but the
fact is that they could not have prevented the Rwanda genocide if
they had wanted to, and they can't prevent the Darfur genocide today.

And it comes at a time when a new genocide appears to be building in
Burundi between the Hutus and the Tutsis. It was the Tutsis who were
mass-murdered and mass-raped and hacked to death by the Hutus in
Rwanda in 1994.

So what's wrong with Africa anyway? Why do these things keep
happening there? Is there a racial issue, as some people think? Or
is there a tribal issue as other people claim? The answer is "none
of the above," and that there's nothing exceptional about the amount
of genocide going on in Africa. What's happening in Africa today is
actually typical of the human race as a whole, and the current cluster
of genocidal African wars is a foretaste of what's to come in the
Western world when the "clash of civilizations" world war begins.

A cluster of genocidal wars

The easy answer to the question of why so many of these genocidal
wars seem to happen only in Africa is that it's an accident of
timing. From the point of view of Generational Dynamics there are
two kinds of wars -- crisis wars that come "from the people," and
non-crisis wars that come "from the politicians." Crisis wars tend
to happen in regular intervals, usually every 70-90 years, and
they're often genocidal.

Since the 1960s, Africa just happens to be at a time when many of
these genocidal crisis wars have been clustering together, creating
the impression that these kinds of wars are endemic to Africa.

In fact, the Western world has had plenty of genocidal crisis wars.

For example, there were the Balkans wars of the 1990s. The acts of
"ethnic cleansing" were performed by whites living in developed
regions that included cosmopolitan cities like Belgrade and Sarajevo.
As Yale professor Amy Chua described it, "In the [Serbian]
concentration camps [of the early 1990s], the women prisoners were
raped over and over, many times a day, often with broken bottles,
often together with their daughters. The men, if they were lucky, were
beaten to death as their [Serbian] guards sang national anthems; if
they were not so fortunate, they were castrated or, at gunpoint,
forced to castrate their fellow prisoners, sometimes with their own
teeth. In all, thousands were tortured and executed."

Another example was the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s, which was a
particularly murderous and genocidal war. More than 50% of the males
of military age in Iraq were conscripted, yielding an army of 1.3-1.6
million men. There were some 400,000 casualties in Iraq, and about
600,000 casualties in Iran. Chemical weapons of mass destruction
were used.

However, those are individual wars. There have always been clusters
of genocidal wars in the West. The last major cluster of genocidal
wars in the West was World War II. The most obvious example of World
War II genocide was the German campaign to exterminate the Jews. It
was also apparent in the Japanese genocidal treatment of American
prisons. But during a crisis war, visceral attitudes becoming
increasingly furious, until the war ends with a major explosion of
rage. This happened in World War II, when America firebombed Dresden
and Tokyo, and then dropped nuclear weapons on Japan. (I am not
criticizing America for doing what they had to do in 1945; I'm simply
saying it happened.)

So if you look at Africa narrowly, then it does seem that the
continent is especially prone to genocidal wars. But if you widen
your focus, you see that genocidal wars are part of being human, and
Africa is not unique at all.

Africa's size

But another question arises: Why do so many genocidal wars happen in
just one little continent of Africa? Africa isn't so little.

If you look at some maps of Africa, you might think that Africa is
about as big as Texas. This misleading view of Africa's size leads
to the idea that Africa has more genocidal wars than the developed
world. How could so many genocidal wars occur in a region the size
of Texas?

Actually, just the Darfur region of the Sudan alone is about the size
of Texas.

Africa

First off, Africa is just a little bit bigger than Texas. In fact,
Africa is bigger than the ENTIRE United States INCLUDING Alaska PLUS
all of China PLUS all of Europe -- and there's still enough room left
over to throw in New Zealand.

So when we think of continuing violence in Africa, remember that, for
its size, it's no more violent than comparable areas on the rest of
the planet.

Africa's geography

There were other important geographical factors as well.

Africa's geography

There was little European penetration of Africa until the mid 1800s,
especially into the rain forests. Why? Because Europeans who tried to
penetrate Africa usually died pretty quickly. Why? Because they got
either malaria from the mosquito or sleeping sickness from the tsetse
fly.

The worst were the rain forests, which act as "sponges, soaked with
water; they are thick with giant trees and tangled underbrush, dark
and silent." They are inhabited only by African pygmies, one of the
four major ethnic groups in Black Africa.

Other black ethnic groups exist outside the rain forest.On the edge
of the Kalahari Desert (in the south) are the Khoi-khoi or Hottentots
and Saan or Bushmen; in Sudan are the Sudanese, and all along the
east are the Bantu, the largest group. These groups all have distinct
ethnic origins, languages, and customs.

As a result of the medical and geographical problems, most of Africa
was off limits to Europeans for centuries. The result was that the
Africans themselves suffered the most of all, since they had little
or no access to the technological advances of the outside world.

But Africa wasn't entirely off limits to outsiders. There were some
areas of early outsider settlements:

Northern Africa, the strip above the Sahara Desert that
bordered the Mediterranean Sea, was repeatedly conquered by armies of
various civilizations, including the Greeks, the Romans and the
Muslims. Today, Northern Africa is pretty much entirely Muslim. In
addition, the Muslims in Egypt moved down the Nile River valley,
using the Nile to irrigate crops.

Ethiopia is unique in that it's the oldest independent country in
Africa, and has never been colonized by Europeans. The earliest
evidence of Ethiopian history was in around 1000 BC when the Queen of
Sheba visited King Solomon. Judaism spread, and Ethiopia became the
site of the black Jews. Christianity was adopted in 330 AD.

South Africa was settled first by the Dutch in the 1600s, who
found it virtually empty. In 1815, the British seized it, forcing
the Dutch (known as Boers or farmers) to move into the grassy plains
of the veld, where they could expand into the region that had been
depopulated by the Mfecane, a major genocidal war of the early 1800s.
South Africa developed an internationally condemned apartheid
(segregation) of the whites from the blacks that was only dissolved in
1990.

Liberia was first settled in 1822 by freed American slaves. The
capital city was Monrovia, named after President Monroe.

The island of Madascar was colonized jointly by the African black
Bantu and by Malaysian tribes that came in from the east. [Braudel,
p. 119]

Muslims and Europeans established numerous outposts on the shores
of Africa for the purpose in trading in gold and slaves. The Muslim
slave trades came first, around 700 AD, mostly on the East coast of
Africa, and the Europeans came later, in the 1500s, mostly on the West
coast.

Slavery and colonialism

A little more needs to be said about slavery.

Slavery is as old as humanity. It's only in recent times that wars
have become "civilized," with conventions about prisoners of war, war
crimes trials, and so forth. In today's world, the winner of a major,
murderous war usually simply kills all the men and rapes all the
women, but this is somewhat new. In the old days, war victors had a
third choice, enslaving the losers, and that was done as a common
matter. The Romans had slaves, the Muslims had slaves - every
civilization had slaves, and every civilization was enslaved when it
lost major wars. People were enslaved by other people in their own
civilization, and by people in other civilizations.

So why was black Africa the last civilization to been enslaved? It
seems to me that returns again to the question of the impenetrability
of Africa, the resulting demonization of an unknown race, and a lack
of the technology that would have made it possible for Africans to
tell their story. Once colonization began in earnest, and Africans
could use modern communications to tell their story, slavery could no
longer survive. However, slavery still exists today within Africa
itself, especially where modern technology hasn't yet reached.

But in the 1850s it was discovered that malaria could be controlled
with quinine, and by the 1870s the floodgates opened. The "Scramble
for Africa" pitted England, Belgium, France, Portugal, Italy, Spain
and Germany against each other to snap up as much of the continent as
possible. By the mid 1890s the Scramble had just carved up just
about all of Africa, and in 1914, all of black Africa except Ethiopia
and Liberia were European colonies. Since 1914, former colonies have
become independent nations.

So the problem of finding generational timelines for all the major
African regions is a big one -- probably as big as finding them for
the rest of the world combined.

19th Century Crisis wars for Southern Africa

Because of its size, Africa has had many crisis wars. In this
section, we're going to summarize two southern Africa crisis wars
that were world famous at the time they occurred, and are still well
remembered in Africa today.

The Mfecane - The Crushing (1817-28)

The Zulus were a tribe in the northern portion of what is now South
Africa. The Zulus went from obscurity to world renown as a result
of Shaka, born in 1787, who became the tribal chief in the early
1800s, and who took the Zulu from being a tribe to being an empire.

This picture shows Skaka's stabbing assegai on the top, contrasted to the throwing spears on the bottom

Shaka revolutioned tribal warfare. For centuries, warriors had
fought with long spears such as those illustrated at the bottom of
the picture to the right. The warriors would throw them at the enemy
and run. Shaka's radical development used the short stabbing
assegai, such as those illustrated on the top. This forced the
warrior to fight in close with his foe, and either kill or be killed.

His army did not attack the enemy head-on. He used a fighting
formation that was likened to the head of an ox. The "horns" were
warriors who ran ahead on either side to envelope the enemy, as the
main body attacked from the front.

Leading an army of 40,000 to 80,000 warriors in the early 1800s,
Shaka merged with or conquered a number of nearby tribes, killing
more than a million men, and by 1818 became Emperor Shaka the Great,
head of the Zulu Kingdom. At that point, the Mfecane began in
earnest. Genocidal warfare broke out among the tribes that the Zulus
had defeated, turning much of the region into a depopulated wasteland.

Aftermath of the Mfecane

The Boer people were Dutch farmers who settled in the southern part
of Africa in the early 1600s. They came to be known as Afrikaners
(as well as Boers, which is Dutch for farmers). They cut off ties to
the the Netherlands, and by the early 1800s were having
confrontations with the British, who gained control of South Africa
by international agreement following the Napoleonic Wars.

This led to a remarkable event. In order to escape the British in
the 1830s, the Boers embarked on the Great Trek to find a new place
to live. They moved into the South African interior, into the
regions that had been depopulated by the Mfecane, by agreement with
the Zulus.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, crisis wars tend to
occur 70-90 years apart. Thus, there were occasional wars between
the British and the Boers, but the level of violence was low to
moderate, and they evaluate to non-crisis wars.

The discovery of diamonds in the 1860s and 1870s transformed the
region, commercializing agriculture and leading to migrant labor
systems, increase in Christian missionary activity, and conquest of
independent kingdoms. [Stearns]

The pace of the non-crisis wars began to pick up in 1877 when the
British annexed the South African Republic, with the intent of
creating a larger federation of South Africa under British control.
This brought them into further conflict with the Boers. However,
non-crisis wars tend to be resolved by compromise and containment, so
after a couple of back and forth victories, in an 1881 treaty the
British even recognized Boer control of the South African Republic.

The Boer War (1899-1902)

In 1899, 82 years after the beginning of the Mfecane wars, the Boers
invaded British towns and drove them out. The Boers had the initial
military advantage because of knowledge of terrain and because there
was only a small British force on hand. But within a year, British
reinforcements were turning the tide, and the British expected to win
soon.

What followed is very much like the American Vietnam war of the 1960s
and 70s. The Boers excaped into the vast bush country, and for two
more years continued to wage unconventional guerilla warfare by
blowing up trains and ambushing British troops.

The British public turned against the war, just as the American
public turned against the Vietnam war in the 1970s. The British
government responded by sending in massive reinforcements and by
confining Boer women and children in concentration camps. Almost
30,000 women and children died of disease and dysentery. The Boers
were finally defeated and forced to accept British sovereignty.

The Boer war was a non-crisis war for the British, but it was a
crisis war for the Boers. This is like the Vietnam war, which was a
non-crisis war for America, but was a crisis war for the North
Vietnamese.

The Boer war was also a major humiliation for the British, since the
great British army had been held off for so long. It gave rise to a
strong antiwar movement and forced the British to completely
reevaluate their previously favorable view of imperialism.

Understanding Africa

Africa does have genocidal wars, but no more than other regions of
the world. The rules of war developed in Generational Dynamics apply
just as surely to Africa as to anywhere else.

Africa has been going through a cluster of genocidal wars recently,
just as the Western World did in World War II. However, far from
being unique, Africa's genocidal wars are more a sign of what's to
come in the Western World, as we continue to head for the "clash of
civilizations" world war that's expected to begin in the next few
years.